Ubuntu 10.04 might bring a new look, but it breaks a few things too.

In the last week I’ve updated Ubuntu from 9.10 to 10.04, and found a few rude shocks along the way.

Samba, for one, is now treated entirely differently, and this of course breaks a number of things including Webmin. Apparently this will be addressed in the next release of Webmin, whenever that is. In the meantime, a distro upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 will likely bork your Samba like it did mine, requiring a clean install to get things working again.

Another thing also broken in 10.04 is a library that affects name resolution, which plays havoc with 3DM2′s email notification feature, crashing 3DM2 in the process. There’s a simple workaround for this: use your mail server’s IP instead of its name. Not optimal, but it will work until the Ubuntu devs catch up and stop palming the problem off to other devs.

New 3DM2 + CLI 10.1

One thing I did notice during the reinstall was that a new version of 3ware’s 3DM2 + CLI package was out, 10.1. Of course 3ware has never explicitly claimed Ubuntu support, so moving off the trusted 9.5.3 was a bit of a concern. I did it anyway, it worked fine (name resolution bug aside) and here’s how you can too.

The installation package has now moved to 100% text, away from the previous Installshield efforts. It’s fairly trivial to set up too. Not Windows trivial, but then, nothing ever is on Linux.

First, uninstall any previous version of 3DM2 — how you do this will depend on the distribution you’ve used. If you’ve used a .deb file, you should find it in Synaptic Package Manager, but if you’ve used the old Installshield package, you’ll need to open up a terminal and issue the following commands:

cd /opt/AMCC/_uninst
sudo ./uninstaller.bin

And follow the prompts. This assumes you installed to the default path of /opt/AMCC, if you’ve installed elsewhere, you’ll need to find uninstaller.bin yourself. Next, you’ll want to download the 3DM2 & CLI Linux 10.1 code set from 3ware.

Open a terminal and navigate to the directory that 3DM2_CLI-Linux-10.1.zip is in.

Type:

unzip 3DM2_CLI-Linux-10.1.zip -d 3dm2
cd 3dm2
chmod +x install.sh
sudo  ./install.sh --install

Then follow the prompts. If you’re still having grief, our old friend has made some .deb files for us.

After a successful install, simply open a browser, point it at https://127.0.0.1:888 and log in with the default password 3ware. Just remember to use your mail server’s IP instead of its host name.

Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed II may have the new DRM scheme by the time it's released on PC.

UPDATE | Good lord. They really have been as stupid as to boot you from the game if your internet connection drops. Short of the usual blog fury and forum explosions, I’m not sure how to treat this. Boycotting is not the answer — the game studios just see that sales are down on PC, assume piracy has won, and it gives them more excuses to slowly strangle the life out of the platform by focusing on console.

Last week, Ubisoft revealed its new DRM scheme, effectively doing away with CD checks by moving the tech online.

Ubisoft hasn’t had the best run with DRM, although fortunately this seems to be a small step in the right direction.

All you need is an ubi.com account, and to associate your game with that account. The technology then authenticates whenever you run the game, and syncs your save games online so you can transfer between machines, or install the game later and still have access.

In short, Ubisoft is doing its best to mimic Steam. It will be fascinating to see if Ubisoft eventually takes it one step further, cutting out the middle man and selling titles direct.

As usual, there are a few troubling things about the whole idea:

1. Double dipping DRM. This is speculative, but I’d hazard a guess Ubisoft titles sold through Steam and other digital distribution platforms will likely still require an ubi.com login, forcing a pointless double-dip DRM process akin to the GFWL games on Steam, or the GTA IV Securom/GFWL/Rockstar Social Club fiasco.
2. Destroying the game experience. A “permanent online connection is required”, and if that is lost then “the game will pause while it tries to reconnect. If the Internet Connection is unable to resume you can continue the game from where you left off or from the last saved game.”  Interruption of the game and destroying the suspension of disbelief is unacceptable, especially if this event occurs at no fault of the player. At the most, the game should only check when it is first launched. If you’re going to make background checks, they need to be in the background. If a check fails, wait until the game process is terminated before enforcing a policy.
3. Mobile users are cut out. Pity the laptop gamer. If you don’t have WWAN or reception drops, too bad. Unlike Steam, there’s no way to set an “offline” mode.
4. We’re asked to trust the untrustworthy. If the service somehow disappears from existence, then Ubisoft “will create a patch for the game so that the core game play will not be affected.” Which is all very nice, but Ubisoft hasn’t exactly established itself as a shining knight of consumer favour. Its version of  Beyond Good and Evil on Steam and GoodOldGames requires a lot of system tweaking to even get working properly on modern systems, despite selling for US$9.99. Prince of Persia Sands of Time, Two Thrones and Warrior Within require you to turn off fog in order to be able to see anything, otherwise it just turns the screen white. These titles are also selling for US$9.99 on Steam. All should be considered broken goods, and a portent for how Ubisoft treats its old code with new customers.
5. Growing pains. It took Steam years to become the reliable service it is today. I suspect we’ll see a few reports of Ubisoft’s servers being unable to cope with the load in the early days of the scheme’s release.

All this is summed up with the remarkably sheltered comment of Brett Wilkinson, Ubisoft’s Director of Customer Support, who states: “We think most people are going to be fine with it. Most people are always connected to an Internet connection”.

Who are these “people”? Brett, you might want to take a look at the most recent internet penetration stats (at the time of writing, 25.6% world wide), or at the very least adjust your sentence. Perhaps a more accurate statement would be: “The bulk of our sales come from densely populated cities with always-on internet connections, and as a business, we follow where the dollar goes”.

At least it’d be honest.

Firmware aside, 3ware splits its application into two parts — its command line tool tw_cli and its web management tool 3dm2. While tw_cli is perfectly fine for managing the array directly, you’ll need 3dm2 to setup mail notifications and scheduled maintenance.

3ware's 3dm2 is where most of your card management will be done, as the CLI is sadly limited.

Until version 9.5.3 was released at the end of November, 3ware’s tools simply didn’t install in Ubuntu 64-bit thanks to a broken installer. To get things working, you needed a third party release.

3ware’s install is simply weird; rather than simply provide a .deb file, once you’ve extracted the .tar.gz “Linux” bundle you’re presented with a .bin file. After making it executable, and running it:

chmod +x setupLinux_x64.bin
sudo ./setupLinux_x64.bin

A Java runtime environment extracts, and, shock — a graphical version of Installshield loads. Who said it was just for Windows?

Installshield on Linux... who'd have thought?

After going through the process and a restart, the webserver was running on https://127.0.0.1:888 with the default password 3ware and everything was as easy as pie. Complemented with GapcMon, apcupsd, Webmin, Samba, Proftpd and Gadmin-proftpd, I’m now ready to start filling up my file server.

Except I no longer care.

Too impatient to wait for the RMA on the dead Asus P5Q-E (of which the replacement is now a spare swap-in board), thanks to an incredibly generous friend I picked up a Gigabyte GA-EP45-Extreme… which OpenSolaris b127 hated, and refused to boot with. After a few days of hair pulling and switching off almost everything I could in the BIOS to try and rectify the issue, I finally admitted OpenSolaris was not to be.

The Gigabyte GA-EP45 Extreme, great board, hated by OpenSolaris

Not willing to risk Nexenta, I dropped to FreeBSD 8, the last bastion of ZFS hope (no folks, FUSE does not count).

FreeBSD worked wonderfully from a compatibility front, but I soon discovered that when it came to virtualisation, it had the same options as a prisoner faced with the Spanish inquisition: basically none. There is, ironically, a version of Sun’s VirtualBox floating around, but it’s a hack job that hates 64-bit, and like most things FreeBSD if you’re not running from the command line you’re asking for pain.

And so, hoping that one day Larry Ellison would open up ZFS licensing a little more so the GPL crowd would stop whining and just integrate it already, I sighed, flicked the 3ware 9650SE into hardware RAID 6 and reached for the Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit disc.

It worked.

Post mortem: List of controller cards that will work with OpenSolaris

While I note with grim satisfaction that Areca has still failed to produce a Solaris driver for it’s ARC-1300ix series, here’s a list of PCI-Express cards known to work with OpenSolaris without requiring any RAID 0/JBOD workarounds, and being able to control at least eight drives.

1. LSI SAS3081E-R
2. Intel SASUC8I flashed with the SAS8031E-R’s IT (initiator target) firmware
3. 3ware 9650SE series

Tiny, yes? The last, which I ended up with due to non-availability of the first two in Australia, is significantly more expensive as it has hardware RAID capability as well.

Post mortem: Final system

Rack: HP 10622
OS: Ubuntu 9.10
PSU: Corsair TX-850
CPU: Intel Q9550
Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator PC-2 8500
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45 Extreme
GPU: Geforce 7600GS silent (to be swapped out with a PCI card when a second 3ware controller card is bought)
Controller card: 3ware 9650SE-8LPML
Network card: HP NC364T
Case: Chenbro RM41416B
UPS: APC Smart-UPS 750
Switch: Netgear GS724T
System drives: Samsung HD501LJ SATA
Array drives (RAID 6 w/XFS): WD RE3 1TB x3, Samsung HD103UJ 1TB x2, Seagate 7200.11 x2, Seagate 7200.12

The only problem left is the Seagate 7200.12, which seems to keep dropping from the array. I’ll have to see if a firmware update to the 3ware card fixes it, otherwise I may need to swap in a new drive (Update: turns out the ridiculously expensive Mini-SAS to SATA cables I bought were dodgy. Upon replacing, I’ve had no dropouts).

Gasp! Intrigue! Another fucking motherboard!

I suppose at this point I really shouldn’t be surprised. The number of things that have gone wrong to date rival most government run projects.

Not covering old ground:

1. The Areca ARC-1300ix 16 was returned on the basis of no Solaris driver and it being a glorified port multiplier. I waited for about a month for the Adaptec 31605 on back order. After showing no signs of turning up any time soon, I cancelled the order and decided to pony up for the highly featured and crazily expensive 3ware 9650SE-8LPML instead.  The day after, I find out Digicor has started distributing the SAS3081E-R again, a significantly cheaper option. Take in mind either choice locks me into a motherboard with at least three PCI-E x4 slots (due to needing 16 channels, and to equip the Intel quad gigabit Ethernet card).
2. The moment the 3ware arrives, I plug it in, and lo and behold, the machine no longer posts. Having seen a similar behaviour on the previous server (would or would not boot based on random hardware plugged in and how many times half the male population has scratched its crotch in the last hour while the wind is blowing west), I proceeded to disconnect everything until only RAM, CPU and GPU remained — and it still didn’t boot. Being that the only remaining part from the old server was the 850W CoolerMaster PSU, I ordered a Corsair TX-850 at AU$240 to remove all doubt, plugged it in AND;
   

   The Corsair TX-850, a PSU with a beefy 12V rail and five year warranty - AU$240.

3. Discovered that the Asus P5Q-E motherboard, which replaced the exploded MSI was the dead part, despite no sparking, despite working a week ago, despite nothing being physically wrong with the board — it just stopped posting,  meaning I’ve once again spent more cash than I have to.
   

   The excellent Asus P5Q-E. Alas, it was not to be.

Well, fuck. That’s two motherboards gone in one build, which is making me wonder if the case is shorting something somehow. At this point I’ve had the chassis for over ten months, with no working system. It’s enough to make you want to buy a prebuilt NAS.

Meanwhile the brand new Netgear GS724T, APC SmartUPS 750 and HP 22RU rack just sit there, waiting for some action…

The mighty 3ware 9650SE-8LPML, coming to a server near you - AU$915.

Netgear GS724T - picked up for AU$280.

APC SmartUPS 750 - AU$231 on eBay.

HP 10622 rack - the one I bought on eBay for AU$180 likely has a bit more wear and tear than the one in this image.

Oh damn... why did no one tell me?

Well, that about settles it. This file server is cursed.

After replacing the CPU and motherboard, I booted up my once again completed fileserver to find out, unlike as advertised, the ARC-1300ix 16 does not support Solaris in any fashion. At all.

Areca has altered the product page too, conveniently after I purchased, to read “Solaris 10/11 (will be available with 6Gb/s Host Adapter)”.

Excuse me? It will be out when something is available that doesn’t even come on motherboards yet, let alone standalone adapters? Not to mention the drivers might possibly not support the card I bought which explicitly claimed support?

Bullshit.

The manual, of course, still claims Solaris support — both the one that came with the card, and online in the form of revision 1.1 (2009/5/8, hosted here in case Areca takes it down). Incidentally, it only offers RHEL for Linux support, and this comes as a floppy image!

For anyone that’s curious, it uses a Marvell 88se6440 plugged into an LSI SASX28. The latter is a port multiplier, supported by Solaris. The former is the controller, supports four drives and is most definitely not supported. Effectively, Areca is jamming in four drives per 3Gb/s channel, squeezed over a PCI-E 4x connection. I am more than slightly vexed.

I have filed a complaint through Areca’s web support form, but given that it didn’t even confirm that anything had been sent, I don’t hold out any hope for a response. If there isn’t one coming quickly, I’ll be requesting a refund from the distributor. My only concern is that there is now really no option but to pony up for the Adaptec 31605, since I no longer have the luxury of four PCI-E x16 slots to play with.

Update:
Areca has responded, and in a timely manner. Q3 huh? Soooo maybe October, factoring in delays. That’s a long time to wait to set up a file server. Have some nice people on the Sun side helping, but I believe it may still be dwelling in refund territory.

—-

Dear Sir,

in our plan, we will release the driver for solaris as soon as the 6G SAS HBA available, the planned schedule is the end of Q3. the driver can be used for 6G and 3G SAS HBA both.  sorry for the inconvenience.

Best Regards,

[Removed for privacy]

Areca Technology Tech-support Division
Tel : [Removed for privacy]
Fax : 886-2-87975970

Ftp://ftp.areca.com.tw

Mirror Ftp :
ftp://areca.starline.de

It seems the CPU is okay for now, but will require further testing, as will all the expansion cards plugged into it at the time. All this after I went to the trouble of swapping out its noisy fans with Scythe Kaze Ultra SY124020L 40mm fans. To add insult to injury, a normal PSU won’t fit properly in the chassis.

Gah.

On a more positive note (so long as the PSU didn’t kill it too), I managed to get my hands on an Areca ARC-1300ix-16, since FortuneTec decided to import a few thanks to demand. It rather uselessly comes with four Mini-SAS to Mini-SAS connectors, requiring me to buy two ludicrously expensive Mini-SAS to SATA breakout cables at around AUD$67 a pop. Considering I’ll eventually need four, almost AUD$270 for four cables is approaching Monster in terms of rip offs. Sadly there seems to be no cheaper alternative, short of ordering from Hong Kong.

In the mean time, now I have my ARC, I don’t need the four PCI-E slots that the MSI provided, just three. I think I’ll go with the much safer and higher quality Asus, in particular, the P5Q-E.

Very nice of a store to say so. I’ve been waiting a long time though, and yet another card has risen to viability…

The LSI SAS3081E-R may provide salvation. Image courtesy of New Egg.

I’ve been told that LSI SAS3081E-R is capable of setting up drives individually, rather than requiring a RAID mode be set. It all seems to be hearsay and rumours though, no one can 100 percent confirm it. Fortunately it’s also sold with Sun gear, which makes compatibility for OpenSolaris a no-brainer. New Egg sells them for US$209, and apparently it’s on PCI-E x8, offering more bandwidth than the ARC-1300ix 16 and having to share it with less ports. Of course LSI can’t decide whether it offers 2400MB/s or 2500MB/s according to its site — given that PCI-E is 250MB/s unidirectional per lane, it can only offer a lower 2000MB/s.

In the meant time, I picked an HP NC364T on eBay Australia for AU$348, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. The quad-gigabit Ethernet card uses dual Intel 82571EB chips over PCI-E x4, which are functionally identical to the 82751GB chips found on the Intel PRO/1000 PT Quad Port Low Profile adapter — for all intents and purposes making this a rebadge. Considering both cards go retail for around AU$1000, it’s an absolute steal, and should be fun to team or load balance over. By and large a dedicated network card should not only reduce the latency over an integrated, but may help maximise network throughput.

While I'm not quite ready to go 4GbE, the HP NC364T should help me grow a little.

No doubt Jade would be unimpressed with her treatment

Sometimes publishers don’t bother updating old games before they put them on Steam. They just upload and watch the money come in, ignoring the complaints as the game fails to run optimally on modern systems.

Ubisoft sure screwed Beyond Good and Evil up in this fashion, from texture issues, to performance problems, to audio synch screw ups. The fact that they sell this broken version on both Steam and GoodOldGames is appalling. Thankfully there’s a few steps you can take to make things friendlier, but you’ll have to accept lower graphical detail and some textures, like the moon in the sky, will always flicker.

Firstly, if the game claims it’s not installed properly, you’ll need to edit the registry.

1. Run regedit.
2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ubisoft\Beyond Good & Evil. If the key doesn’t exist, create it.
3. Create a new String Value and call it Install Path. Set the value to where Beyond Good and Evil is installed (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\beyond good and evil).
4. Restart Steam and the game should now launch settings application.

If it’s loading the game, here’s how to fix some of the performance issues:

1. Run the SettingsApplication.exe file from Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\beyond good and evil. Select the Advanced Settings tab.
2. Check Manual compatibility settings. Deselect HW Vertex Processing, Fastflip and Triple-buffering. This should fix the majority of graphical glitches, although comes at the cost of slowdown. You’ll still get the occasional texture flicker.
3. If you own an Nvidia card, move the Water detail slider to Low to fix the performance issues in the city. Setting Shadows quality to Low and Antialiasing to Off should also help the overall game. These settings should run the game comfortably on a GeForce GTX 275.
   

   Yes, against all your better judgement, you need to turn things down or off.

4. If you own an ATI card, things aren’t quite as rough, although you will be nagged at every launch about out of date drivers. You’ll need to take AA down a couple of notches so particles don’t slow the game down, but in testing a Radeon HD 5870 handled the game fine with the AA dialed back two notches at 2560×1600.
   

   ATI users are a bit better off, but will get nagged about driver updates at every launch.

5. If you have a multicore PC, you may experience audio synch issues. To fix, upon running the game Alt+Tab out and invoke Windows Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Go to the Processes tab, select BGE.exe,  right click and choose Set Affinity. Deselect everything except CPU 0. Return to the game and begin playing.
   

   Setting affinity for BGE.exe

If you don’t want to set affinity every time you run Beyond Good and Evil, you can modify the .exe using a program called ImageCFG.

1. You’ll need to first right click on the Beyond Good and Evil entry in Steam, and choose Properties and then hit the Updates tab. Select Do not automatically update this game and click Close.
2. Download ImageCFG and copy it into your Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\beyond good and evil folder.
3. Open up a Command Prompt, browse to the above directory and use the following commands:

imagecfg -u bge.exe
imagecfg -a 0x1 bge.exe

The first command modifies the .exe to be uniprocessor only, the second defines the core affinity it should run on; in this case it’s been associated with CPU 0.

Using ImageCFG to modify BGE.exe to single core.

Enjoy this stylish and excellent old game.

This adds an extra layer of complexity to rebuilding disks, as when a disk fails, the card assumes a RAID 0 array has died, regardless of what you’re doing with ZFS. Apart from removing the ability to yank a disk on a live array then pop it back in and continue as normal, this adds extra overhead as the card is managing RAID 0 data for every drive attached to it on top of the RAID-Z already being done on the software side. Bad, bad, bad.

The LSI MegaRAID SAS 84016E

We have a new contender though, the LSI MegaRAID SAS 84016E (also known as the Intel SRCSASPH16I), which definitely has OpenSolaris driver support, but as usual is not available in Australia (the Intel is, but is over AU$1,000). It’s more expensive than the vapourous ARC-1300ix-16, thanks to it being PCI-E 8x rather than 4x. It’s also a true RAID card with 256MB of memory, and can handle up to RAID 60 thanks to a 500MHz Intel IOP333 processor.

PC Pitstop sells them at US$689, and the site even has a section saying it ships to Australia. Now if only a certain eBay seller wasn’t selling it for almost US$100 cheaper with free shipping…

Then there’s the Intel RAID Controller SRCSATAWB. This is a modified LSI MegaRAID SAS 8708ELP, doesn’t work in PCI-E 2.0, seems to have virtually the same featureset as the 84016E, but with only two mini-SAS ports. EYO Drop Shipping is currently selling it for AU$576.18.

The Intel RAID Controller SRCSATAWB

For both, the manuals mention nothing about JBOD, which may resign them to the same scrap heap as the P400. They do mention virtual drives, but these seem to only be accessible when creating an array. There’s no mention of running single drives in order to access software RAID.

Edit: Neither card offers JBOD functionality. At this rate I’ll end up buying the crazily expensive Adaptec 31605 just to get working gear.